Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Fact Crime

The true account of one boy’s lifelong search for his boarding-school bully.

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles prize-winning author Allen Kurzweil’s search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world’s largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California.

While hunting down his tormentor, Kurzweil encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux royal swindlers, a crime investigator “with paper in his blood,” and a  onocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil’s riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the “parallel lives” of a victim and his abuser.

A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menace into an unlikely muse, Whipping Boy is much more than a tale of karmic retribution; it is a poignant meditation on loss, memory, and mourning, a surreal odyssey born out of suffering, nourished by rancor, tempered by wit, and resolved, unexpectedly, in a breathtaking act of personal courage.

Whipping Boy features two 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and  83 images throughout.

Kurzweil’s quest for answers uncovers a story more bizarre and dangerous than he ever imagined.

• A Childhood Nemesis: In an exclusive Swiss boarding school, a ten-year-old boy’s life is forever changed by the cruelties of his charismatic and sadistic roommate, Cesar Augustus.
• An Obsessive Quest: What begins as a schoolboy grudge evolves into a forty-year international manhunt, taking the author from the gilded boardrooms of Park Avenue to the slums of Manila in search of answers.
• Fake Royalty and Fraud: The search for Cesar plunges Kurzweil into the surreal world of international con artists, including a monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta and a gang of faux royal swindlers.
• Literary True Crime: Winner of the Edgar Award, this is more than a hunt for a bully; it’s a profound and witty meditation on memory, trauma, and the bizarre ways a childhood menace can become a lifelong muse.

“Whipping Boy is like nothing I’ve ever read, an investigative memoir that’s honest, funny, sad, and edge-of-the-chair suspenseful. I loved it.” - Dan Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“Whipping Boy is much more than the search for a bully. Kurzweil takes readers on a suspenseful and thrilling ride.” - Bookish

“Whipping Boy reads like a European version of American Hustle…Full of intrigue and suspense, the story follows the bizarre twists and turns of one man’s journey to find and confront his childhood tormentor-ready-made for a film treatment.” - Kirkus Reviews

“A captivating hybrid of investigative journalism and memoir…Kurzweil is not simply settling a private score; he’s standing up for anyone who has ever been bullied.” - Chicago Tribune

“A fascinating, multi-pronged morality tale about victimhood, skewed perception and the liberation of facing your demons.” - Washington Post

“Pleasure-packed…makes the wily con artists in American Hustle look stuffy by comparison.” - Details

“This meditation on pain and memory...only sounds like fiction.” - Library Journal

“A memoir that reads like a thriller as the author circles the globe to find the man who made his boarding school days a living hell.” - Tampa Bay Times

“I enjoyed Whipping Boy on so many levels. It’s wonderfully conceived and wonderfully executed.” - Ricky Jay, author of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers

“Kurzweil crafts an entertaining, sharply reported picaresque centering on the colorful leaders of the scam, who bamboozled their marks by posing as monocled European aristocrats and produced a fake deed from the fictional King of Mombessa… A crime saga that’s ripe with hilarious humbuggery.” - Publishers Weekly

“Kurzweil does the delightfully unexpected: He morphs his story from a poignant memoir into a true-crime thriller.” - NPR.org